Archives for: November 2012, 24

Last night I was supine on a table, undergoing a medical procedure. Happy Thanksgiving? The light fixture above my head was interesting: A giant photo transparency of a view of the heavens "actually taken from the Hubbel telescope", overlying a large light square that was divided into quarters. Supposed to relax the patient. As I am in the midst of serious personal medical challenges, I'm used to viewing thousands of images of my own and reference innards and organs, and I was struck by the similarity of this slide's appearance to those bio-forms.

"You know," I said to the technologist, "The picture on the ceiling looks like pulmonary parenchyma, dense with miliary nodules, and there's some patchy infiltrate in the left lower quadrant." Needless to say, he was stunned.

As I lay on that table, throughout the next hour or so, I pondered the analogue, remembering some beautiful Nature photographs I've seen that really play up the theme -- flowers and foliage, meteorological patterns, rock formations, speaking a language strangely similar to that spoken by our own histology and gross anatomy.

On my way out of the hospital, I noticed the artwork in the halls and found it very aptly chosen. The themes were similar: Leaves floating on a rippling pond, or swirling in a whirlpool or windstorm; a single flower, a tendril dangling, encircling...

One can "be sick" and see that, exclusively.
Or one can thus gain entrée into yet another wondrous sphere, where even diseased cells can claim their share of beauty.